Next weekend the Chor Leoni Men’s Choir will perform at St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church and West Vancouver United Church for their annual Christmas shows. But one song in their repertoire has a particularly strong connection to the choir.
Baritone Greg Mohr learned of is genealogical connection to Father Joseph Mohr, the author “Silent Night,” at a young age as part of the family lore. The song was originally written as a poem in the 1800s. The Mohrs confirmed the connection after a family member travelled to Germany and Austria and tracked the lineage back to Joseph Mohr making him Greg’s great-great-great-great-great-great uncle.
“[The song] is meaningful, it’s about life, it’s about hopes and dreams and longings, it’s about peace for the world and about our place in that world,” said Mohr, who’s been with Chor Leoni since 2004. He says Christmas shows are some of his and his fellow choir members’ favourite performances of the year.
Stories vary about the first performance of “Silent Night,” but it is said that the church organ at St. Nicholas Church in Austria stopped working on Christmas Eve 1818. Not to be deterred, Father Joseph Mohr gave his poem “Silent Night” to the church musician, Franz Xavier Gruber, who composed a simple melody to be played on guitar. They performed the song together for the first time that day.
Chor Leoni will perform “Silent Night” as it was originally intended to close out their Christmas shows. A guitar will play the melody while the audience will be invited to sing along with the choir for the candle-lit performance.
“There’s something about the simplicity of the song that is why that guitar and just the voices, it’s just so beautiful and ethereal and really in the business of our lives and that sort of hyper consumeristic approach that we have in our culture, to just go back to those simple words,” Mohr said.
The shows will also premiere Zachary Wadsworth’s commission “Snowflakes” to poetry by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Other performances include “Bashana Haba’ah,” a work in Hebrew that welcomes the new year and Paul Mealor’s “I Saw Eternity,” along with a selection of songs from Chor Leoni’s holiday CD, Star of Wonder.
In 2011 “Silent Night” was added to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage List and has been translated into more than 300 languages.
Chor Leoni performs at St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church Dec. 14, 16 and 17 and at West Vancouver United Church Dec. 15. For more details, go to chorleoni.org.
